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Credit: Nick Romanenko
Graduate School of Education Dean
Richard De Lisi, left, chats at a press
conference with Professor William L.
Librera. Most recently the state
education commissioner, Librera has been
tapped to head the new Institute for
Improving Student Achievement.
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In a move to intensify and focus efforts to improve New Jersey’s schools, President Richard L. McCormick has created a new institute at Rutgers to lead the university’s education research and service throughout the state.
William L. Librera, New Jersey’s former commissioner of education and a respected education theorist and practitioner, joined the Rutgers faculty this month as presidential research professor of education and director of the new institute.
The Rutgers Institute for Improving Student Achievement, based at the Graduate School of Education in New Brunswick, will serve as a hub for the university’s many diverse partnerships with public schools and school districts as well as local governments, businesses and funding organizations. It also will create programs aimed at increasing student achievement in a wide range of urban, rural and suburban districts across the state.
McCormick has committed $800,000 to the institute for a minimum of two years. By soliciting additional funds from local school districts, foundations and corporations, the institute will become self-supporting, Librera said.
“First and foremost, this new initiative is designed to produce substantial, tangible improvements in the experience and success of New Jersey’s students and their schools,” McCormick said. “It will offer opportunities for our graduate students to participate in educational research and outreach to communities. Finally, this project will consolidate and focus our many efforts at Rutgers to improve education in New Jersey.”
The new institute is the result of more than a year of exploration by Richard De Lisi, dean of the Graduate School of Education, into ways in which the GSE could contribute to McCormick’s vision to help all New Jerseyans benefit from their state university. The institute is designed to convey to New Jersey’s teaching and learning communities the results of groundbreaking education research by GSE and other Rutgers faculty.
“The faculty at the Graduate School of Education have long been aware that our school sits right in the middle of one of the most diverse and dynamic states in our nation. New Jersey provides an unlimited combination of environmental factors in which to study teaching and learning,” said De Lisi, to whom Librera will report. “With this new institute, we will be able to focus our resources to design portable and sustainable solutions and move these ideas into classrooms to benefit student learning and achievement.”
Librera, who holds a doctorate in education from the GSE at Rutgers, said the university’s work so far, while in some cases “brilliant,” has nevertheless been “characterized more by individual efforts than by a strategic focus that involves the university as a whole.”
“I do think that it is not possible for us to be a premier research institution in public education without a real practice in New Jersey public schools,” Librera said. He added that Rutgers had already made important connections. “Simply, the whole needs to be greater than the sum of its parts.”
Librera said the institute will address the challenges facing the state’s schools: a “well entrenched and long standing” achievement gap between white and nonwhite students, and the exodus of New Jersey teachers combined with a growth in classroom size.
The new institute will focus on four essential components:
• Assessment and evaluation: Helping schools interpret and use data they already have to improve teaching and learning
• Leadership: Expanding leadership in schools and communities
• Content and teaching expertise: Developing in teachers the necessary understanding of content and the pedagogy for quality teaching and student achievement in language arts literacy, mathematics and science
• High school reform: Supporting new models of organizing and structuring high schools and schedules that promote high performance.
Ashanti M. Alvarez contributed to this article.
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